What The Government Learned About UFOs, Alien Spacecraft: Reports

WASHINGTON, DC — A highly anticipated government report isn’t expected to confirm that the unusual movements Navy pilots reported seeing were from alien spacecraft, but neither does it dismiss the possibility, according to media reports.

The report by intelligence officials on unidentified aerial phenomena — or unidentified flying objects or UFOs, as they’re more commonly known — is due June 25. Congress in December ordered the director of National Intelligence to summarize and report on what the U.S. government knows about the aircraft.

A Defense Department UAP task force contributed to the report, which isn’t expected to offer a final word on what pilots have seen but is instead characterized as a status report.

The Pentagon has walked back decades of public denial about the existence of mysterious sightings in the sky, but the report isn’t expected to shed much more light on the 120 encounters reported by Navy pilots.

Lawmakers have pushed for more public disclosure about UAP sightings in recent years.

“There’s a stigma on Capitol Hill,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) told “60 Minutes” in May. “I mean, some of my colleagues are very interested in this topic and some kind of, you know, giggle when you bring it up. But I don’t think we can allow the stigma to keep us from having an answer to a very fundamental question.”

The New York Times, the first to publish details of the upcoming report, said the only conclusive finding in the UAP report is that whatever the pilots saw, the vast majority weren’t American military aircraft or associated with advanced U.S. government technology.

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But, as CNN reported, the intelligence report doesn’t rule out the possibility that Russia, China or another U.S. adversary is behind the UAPs, and that could raise national security concerns, officials told the news outlet.

The reports of American military officials about their encounters with mysterious craft prompted the government to order an investigation. One of them, retired Naval Cmdr. David Fravor, said he was conducting a training mission off the coast of California when he saw an oblong craft flying erratically through his airspace at incredible speed, maneuvering in a way that defied accepted principles of aerodynamics.

Fravor didn't know what to make of it but said it was not like anything he had ever seen in nearly 20 years of flying. The wingless object was about 40 feet long and shaped like a Tic Tac, Fravor said. He described it is other-worldly in a 2017 interview with ABC News.

“I can tell you, I think it was not from this world,” Fravor said at the time. “I'm not crazy, haven't been drinking. It was — after 18 years of flying, I've seen pretty much about everything that I can see in that realm, and this was nothing close.”

Bill Whitaker, a correspondent for “60 Minutes,” interviewed Fravor and several others who have seen unexplained phenomena in the sky.

Fravor recalled that he wanted to get a closer look at the strange aircraft, which he said was about the size of his F/A-18F and mimicked its moves. As he got closer, the craft continued to gain altitude, “and when it gets right in front of me, it just disappeared.”

Navy Lt. Alex Dietrich described similar encounters.

“So your mind tries to make sense of it,” she said, speaking publicly about the encounter for the first time in the “60 Minutes” interview. “I'm gonna categorize this as maybe a helicopter or maybe a drone. And when it disappeared. I mean, it was just ….”

Lue Elizondo, who spent 20 years running military intelligence operations and served in the Pentagon's Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, told Whitaker there are simple explanations for some of the things people are seeing in the sky, "but there are some that, that are not," he said.

"We're not just simply jumping to a conclusion that's saying, 'Oh, that's a UAP out there.' We're going through our due diligence," Elizondo said. "Is it some sort of new type of cruise missile technology that China has developed? Is it some sort of high-altitude balloon that's conducting reconnaissance?

"Ultimately, when you have exhausted all those what-ifs and you're still left with the fact that this is in our airspace and it's real, that's when it becomes compelling, and that's when it becomes problematic."

The upcoming report won’t draw many conclusions about the rate of acceleration of the craft, or their ability to switch directions and disappear in the water, The Times said.

UFO skeptics, including author and investigator Mick West, say there are Earth-bound explanations for what the pilots have seen. West told The Associated Press he supported the government report, especially as it concerns the possibility of incursion of U.S. airspace by an adversary.

“People are conflating this issue with the idea that these UFOs demonstrate amazing physics and possibly even aliens,” West told The AP.

“The idea that this is some kind of secret warp drive or it’s defying physics as we know it, there really isn’t any good evidence for that,” West said.